Intersect is getting closer and closer to release by the day. This summer has allowed Joe and I to dedicate an unprecedented amount of time to this engine and as a result of that we are ready to provide this road map starting now during Alpha 1.5 all the way to Release.

Alpha Plans (Complete!)

Alpha has gone really, really, well. You all have been absolutely amazing with all the bug reports and support. We love how you keep us on track and moving along. At the time of posting we are on Alpha Version 1.5. so here is what we have planned heading into beta.

Alpha Releases

Alpha v1.6: -- Released August 2nd, 2016

Completed Admin Panel

Spawn Items

Ban/Kick/Mute Players

Warp to Players or Warp them to you

Setting Admin Power

And a few other little tricks

NPC Spells

NPCs can heal, dash, shoot projectiles, and more!

Toggleable NPC Combat:

Dodged a bullet from a npc? Did it hit another? Suddenly you have a teammate! The enemy of thy enemy, right?

You can set enemies for each type of Npc. If they see an enemy they will fight!

Map/Npc/Resource saving immediately taking effect for online players.

Console Commands

Lots of extra tools will be added to the server console for easier administration.

Tons and tons of bug fixes!

Alpha v1.7: -- Released August 10th, 2016

Event Updates

Ability to use the players name in dialoges.

Allowing events to show who's online

Allowing events to tell the time and react to in-game time.

Dynamic Day/Night system with configurable time and tinting.

Alpha v1.8: -- Released August 15th, 2016

Unicode support! (The first step towards multiple languages)

Tons of bug fixes/cleanup.

Whatever else we might want to add before beta!

Alpha v1.9: -- Released August 20th, 2016

Tons of bug fixes/cleanup.

We want beta to be really stable!

Beta Plans

Once we reach beta we will increment the version number to 2.0. Starting at Beta 2.0 we are going to fix up the remaining systems for epic games.

Beta Releases

Beta 1: -- Released January 7th, 2017

Trading

Trade items between 2 or more players

Parties

Group up and share exp/rewards while playing together.

Chatbubbles

Because they are cute!

Quests!!!

You will be able to assign, track, and complete quests.

Events can change based off of what quests are available and which ones you have completed!

We (Joe and I) will spend less time developing and more time helping everyone make games.

We will start releasing source tutorials, getting started guides, and more!

We want to be here before Q4 2047!

..and then we can start on the Intersect 2.0 road map.

Everything above is subject to change but that's our hope. We hope you like our plans moving forward and we will see how well we can stick to them as time goes on. As always this thread is open for discussion, feel free to drop us a note below

Sorry it has taken so long to get this out... there's been a lot going on.. and we want to make sure we do this right. The good news is that B5 is going to be awesome, there's a ton of cool new features, dozens of quality of life improvements, an entire new database engine, and major general improvements to our code base.

With any update this large you should all expect to find a LOT of bugs that will need to be worked out. We did rewrite the entire database engine this update, and we haven't had an opportunity to stress it out yet, so we're hoping you all can help us from this point on

Our ultimate goal with this release plan is to avoid a situation where you all go several weeks developing your games, and then we realize there is a big problem which would cause some or all of you all to lose your work.

With all that said, our current plan is to release Beta 5 in three stages:

Stage 1 (Game Testing) - Out Now!

Awhile back @Kibbelz designed a small game that I could use for testing and to demo our game engine. I've finally worked out all the bugs and upgraded this demo game to Beta 5. So during our first stage of release we're asking all of you to download the Intersect Demo Game and play it for a bit.

I want 3-4 people to give the full Beta 5 a try in a closed test over the next 2-3 days. Let's find the major bugs and patch them up, and then the community can come together to help us work out the rest. Looking for people who can dedicate several hours a day 3-4 each day over the next 2-3 days. Are you interested? Let me know by filling out the form below, so I can pick the best group of testers for this task.

We've just released Beta 4.4 with a few extra bug fixes to hold everyone over with until 4.5. The biggest bug fixed is that when bugs happened they weren't being written to the log files -- so we've been in the hard as to how some bugs have been happening. We touched on a few others as well...

Bug Fixes/Problems Solved:

Mana Pots Restoring Health

Animations Sometimes not Despawning

Projectiles spawning inside blocked/out of bounds areas.

Errors in the editors when using really weird filenames.

Editor failing to connect to game server on extremely slow machines.

Players remaining in game after disconnecting.

Party window crash when party members disconnected.

Events not taking items correctly.

and more!

Bugs Created: Health Pots no longer work at all.

But that's it. There are a few other background modifications in this release so I can automate server creation and management for my new hosting service -- otherwise there are no new features to speak of yet.

Up Next

Beta 5 is on the way!

Download

If you're already using 4.3, just download 4.4 and overwrite your .exes.

We've just released Beta 4.3 tons of bug fixes found in Beta 4, 4.1, and 4.2 We're hoping this version will allow games like Arcwyre to launch, and allow everyone to create their games while we start to progress on Beta 5

Bug Fixes/Problems Solved:

Common events not triggering correctly & Questing bugs that go along with it!

Banning effecting all accounts instead of just one (doh!)

1280x720 resolution option disappearing

Npcs/Resources not always appearing on adjacent maps

Various bugs with visual warping/map grid previews not showing correctly (or at all)

Crashing when targetting buffed npcs/players

Random map layers flashing

Crash when dragging spell icons

All kinds of crafting bugs

Fogs rendering on wrong map layers

Class spawn directions not working

NPCs not regenerating health when you leave maps

Class editor crashing when you delete character graphics

Editor lighting

Friendly spells not targeting correctly

Players not learning skills set in class editor on level up

Heal spells not working

Animated sprites are no longer case sensitive

Npcs not spawning facing the correct directions

and more!

Features/Updates

HP Bars now hide when full health

You can no longer attack friendly npcs

Self Contained .Exes

The client, editor, server, and migrator are now self contained. This means that you no longer need the /libs/ folders and you no longer need the .Config.exe files! After updating to Beta 4.3 you can delete the following:

Client and Editor/libs/

Client and Editor/Intersect Client.exe.config

Client and Editor/Intersect Editor.exe.config

Any PDB files in the Client and Editor folder.

Server/libs/

Server/Intersect Server.exe.config

Server/Intersect Migration Tool.exe.config

Any PDB files in the Server folder.

You can finally deploy the Intersect Client and Server now to Linux and OSX without moving files around! Just copy the Client or Server folder, install mono, open terminal, navigate to the intersect folder, and run: mono "Intersect Client.exe" OR mono "Intersect Server.exe"!!!

Up Next

Beta 5 is on the way!

Download

If you are already using Beta 4, 4.1, or 4.2 then click on the upgrade link below for upgrade instructions! Otherwise, click clean installation to be taken to the download

Editor flickering when using tilesets with UTF8 characters in the name - Sorry for the trouble @Refur

and more!

Up Next

There might be one more hotfix release (Beta 4.3) but probably not. We are going to shift our focus to Beta 5. We promise Beta 5 won't take nearly as long as Beta 4 did! Beta 5 will bring a lot more control over spell casting/hit animations, weapon animations, resource behavior before and on death, and more!

Download

If you are already using Beta 4 or Beta 4.1 just download 4.2 and extract that archive in place of your current game. Run the migration tool in the Server folder!

Friends list, chat channels, automatic port forwarding, xp style autotiles, faster networking, dynamic ui, multiple character support, fixed combat, custom credits, keybindings, spell effects hud, paperdoll rendering within the ui, and more is included in this update. This is a big one, and we're happy we finally have it ready for everybody.

For more information about each specific update see the following dev logs:

Dynamic UI

In Beta 4 there are 2 xml files in your Client/Resources/GUI folder. You can edit these xml files (MainMenu.xml, InGame.xml) to resize, reposition, hide, or otherwise modify UI elements in your game. You have full control over fonts, text sizes, colors, button locations, and a lot more. I will be working on some official documentation on how to modify these xml files over the course of the next few weeks.

The Future

This is possibly the biggest update we've ever released. As such we expect plenty of bugs to manifest for you all. We will quickly follow up with Beta 4.1 as we fix the early and most annoying bugs you find. Beta 5 will have a lot of smaller quality of life changes. Beta 6 will likely be the last Beta release. For more info you can view our roadmap here:

Beta 3 Users: Simply overwrite your files with those in the Beta 3.1 download. You should delete the language directories in the Client and Editor/Resources folder and Server/Resources folder for the new strings and language fixes.

Pretty simple. Open the resources/languages folder in the client, editor, server, or migration tool after running for the first time.

Copy the Client.English.xml, Editor.English.xml, Server.English.xml or Migrator.English.xml and change English to you language of choice.

Open your .xml files in notepad and replace the English strings with your language.

Finally open the Client, Editor, Server, or Migrator resources/config.xml and add this line but replace English with your language.

<Language>English</Language>

The correct language will be loaded automatically when running Intersect programs.

You can allow players to walk through each other (or not) based on map type.

These settings can be found in your server/resources/config.xml file. You can change whether or not players should be able to walk through each other on different map types.

You can change paperdoll rendering order based on direction players are facing.

These options are also now available in the server/resources/config.xml. Feel free to change them however fits your game best!

Bags are now an item type for players to have extra item storage.

In the item editor you can set items to be bags and you can set their capacity. Users will then receive what looks like an extra inventory when using bag items:

Projectile shot spells and weapons can require ammo!

These options are found in the projectile editor

Dynamic Requirements

Dynamic requirements lets to make several lists of conditions to use items, cast spells, start quests, and farm resources.

Each of those use cases may have 0 or many condition lists. Condition lists allow you to create multiple sets of conditions that would allow using the item, casting the spell, etc. While you can have several lists of conditions, only one list has to be fully met to allow whatever action to occur.

So for example in the past you were able to say that an item required the player be level 10 and the player must be a warrior. Now you could create items that require the player to be a level 10 warrior, or a level 5 tank, or a level 20 mage, or they have completed X quest. Dynamic requirements uses event conditional branches under the hood so you can permit or prohibit interactions with items/spells based on event switches, server settings and more.

It will take some practice, and we will have to work on documenting this feature, but the scope of Intersect games just expanded significantly.

Download

If you are currently using Intersect Beta 2 click upgrade! Otherwise click clean install.

Intersect is nearing completion and all of the major features we have planned are done. After Beta 3 we expect to stop creating big new systems and features, we are pretty happy with the current state of the engine. It's getting to the point where we need to focus more on bug reports and optimizations so we can Greenlight Intersect and reach a stage where we are comfortable releasing and supporting the source for the public.

Joe and I previously discussed bringing a new developer onto our team so we extended an offer and are excited to welcome @SPQR Panda to the Intersect team! We've received a ton of offers and requests from developers to join our team so this decision was not made lightly. Panda has recently been working with Damian on Orion+, he helped us fix critical engine bugs, and design editor ui elements; he has given so much to our community and we feel like he will be the best fit for our team.

Panda will be able to help us out with bug fixes, optimizations, and getting Intersect releases out to you all sooner. Let's give him a warm welcome to the team and we are gonna go get to work!

It's not complete, but I've done some major upgrades to FreeMmorpgMaker.com -- otherwise known as the home of Intersect. I modified our existing layout and theme to be dark, sleek, and have better compatibility across mobile devices. On top of that we now have some blogging capability and I've reworked Intersects documentation.

Okay, okay.. I know you're laughing. Documentation rework? What was there to rework? The answer is that there was never any documentation to begin with. Well now there is... or, at least a foundation that I'm hoping we can work together to build upon. Hop on over to our documentation library and take a look at what I've been working on this week.

We really don't have much documentation yet, but that's going to change. I will be filling out various pages over time and I could use some help. If anyone would like to lend a hand and drop some knowledge there is a link at the top right of every page that reads "Suggest an Edit". Click that link and start typing. All changes are sent to us for review so you can't break anything.

I hope you all like how this is all coming together. Feel free to drop comments, suggestions, and constructive critique below.

At long last we are finally at Beta!!!!!!! Intersect now contains all of the primary features we wanted for our engine when we started this project 2 years ago. Instead of going into a sentimental speech let me show you all of the Beta 1 updates

Questing! The final editor is done!

Trading, Parties, and Crafting! (Conquer challenges together!)

Remastered Interface! (DarkUI :D)

Our friends at Eclipse showed us where we went wrong, so now we are working to make things right. Only the main editor is dark right now all of the other editors will follow in the upcoming beta releases. I want to give a big shoutout to @Robin. His Eclipse Origins helped Joe and I get started with programming. That alone completely changed the course of our lives. It only felt right that we used his DarkUI library in this new engine. Thanks for everything man!

This should hold you over while I move back to school. With a little luck this will be the last release before beta.

Upgrade Instructions (Required for 1.8 Alpha users!)

1. Overwrite your current 1.8 installation with all of the 1.9 files below.

2. (Optional) Download the updated fonts that are attached and replace your existing fonts in Client/Resources/fonts. These fonts include extended punctuation options, currency symbols, and misc symbols such as a smiley face. ☺

As request be certain members of the forum, today we tried streaming some development on Intersect! We saw it was a good success, not only were members being educated on Intersect development, we even had suggestions we could accomplish on the spot such as the admin kill player command, thanks @Gahduvdeth! We also had viewers outside of AGD viewing the stream, which in turn will hopefully bring in more members. I personally had a lot of fun running the stream as did JC when he joined the stream later on. After today I'd like to announce I will try to stream whenever I develop on Intersect, I will try to run daily streams however there will be no given streaming hours!